Sermon 356
14. Look, I am telling you, you have heard what I say, they, the clergy, can hear me too. Any of them who wishes to have his own property, and live off his own income, and act against these instructions of ours – it's not enough for me to say that he won't remain with me, he won't even continue to be a clergyman. I had said, you see, and I know I said, that should they be unwilling to undertake community life with me, I wouldn't deprive them of their clerical status, they could stay somewhere else, live somewhere else, live as best as they could for God. And yet I placed before their eyes what a bad thing it is to fall away from one's commitment. I prefered, you see, to have even crippled colleagues than to mourn over dead ones. Because anyone who is a hypocrite is dead.
So just as if any of them wishes to stay outside and live off his own income, I won't deprive him of his clerical status; so now, because the others have chosen, by God's grace, this community life, any of them who lives it hypocritically, who is discovered to have his own property still, I won't permit him to make a will about it, but I will strike him off the roll of the clergy. Let him appeal against me to a thousand councils, let him sail overseas against me wherever he likes, certainly wherever he can; so help me God, wherever I am bishop, that man cannot be a clergyman. You have heard me, they have heard me. But I hope in our God and in his mercy, that just as they have accepted my arrangements in a cheerful spirit, so they may observe them with simplicity and fidelity.
(trans. E. Hill)